A while ago the Architectural League of New York put out one of their Situated Technologies pamphlets exploring the concept of Micropublic Places, in which the intersection of ambient intelligence, human computing, architecture, social engineering, and urbanism act as sites for re-imagining the public realm (in this reading the idea of public realm is taken from Arendt and Latour as, “a contested space ruled by antagonism rather than conformism”).

Some of this reminds me of Dan Hill’s explorations into neuroscience and cultures of decision-making and the Helsinki Design Lab’s work in understanding local decision-making cultures, but the really interesting part is the consideration and inclusion of things in the dialogue.

One only has to take a closer look to realize that technical objects have always been things in the original sense of the word, merely concealing their complicated networks of relationships under smooth and perfect surfaces. Confronted with things like cars, nuclear reactors, baby milk, mobile phones, etc., we are forced to acknowledge “external”” forces that exist within things. So Latour writes with good reason, “What the etymology of the word thing … had conserved for us mysteriously as a sort of fabulous and mythical past has now become, for all to see, our most ordinary present”“. Moreover, in a globalized world, things—including the accidents they cause and their potential misuse—connect us more than kinship, identity, or territory. We have become cosmopolitans gathered together by things rather than by nationalities.

— Micropublic Places

This is important to consider as we attempt to solve the wicked problems confronting us. How do we make visible what is hidden, how do we give representation to things that have never been afforded such? And when we do, how does this impact cultures of decision-making?

Contemporary cities don’t resemble the Greek polis. Rather, they are gigantic households in which private matters take on public relevance. Under such circumstances it is hard to find a place to represent Greenland’s glaciers or the migration flows from the South, or, for that matter, any form of the avant-garde. But we know for sure that the local problems can’t be solved without taking into consideration global warming, global migration, and time battering the earth. How do we give them a voice?

— Micropublic Places

Indeed, how do we give them a voice?

Corral de Bustos, population 11,000, is a small town in the pampas of Argentina. Papa Mignolo grew up there, my grandmother still lives there, and we are related to roughly half the town. The playground adjacent to the central plaza is where my brother received a huge electrical shock, and where I split my chin open on a see-saw^[1].

In December of 2011 I went back to visit with the boy’s Canon EOS-1 VH (using Kodak 400 TX film). Though the trip is just a few months removed, the black and white film does an amazing job of manifesting fading memories and capturing the omnipresent nostalgia I feel for Corral de Bustos, even when I am there.

This gate, and the wall it is attached to, is the only thing remaining of the house where my father grew up. My grandfather would smoke cigarettes by the gate and watch the world go by, while my father and his cousins played in the street.

The old train station adjacent to downtown Corral. Buses now bring people in and out of town at laughably odd hours.

This is probably the second most common sight in the pampas. The first? Everyone and their mother playing soccer.

Monsanto has largely taken ove the agricultural landscape with soya monocrops.

Old grain silos.

Downtown Corral de Bustos. I swear this was taken in 2011, not 1970.

Should you ever find yourself in Corral de Bustos, go to here. We ordered lunch and dinner from La Cuisine for over a week and everything was mouthwateringly-amazing.

This is my grandmother's house (the small part; the large building in back is a warehouse). She's lived here ever since I can remember, and not much has changed. Even the photos on the walls remain the same...

The night of the great asado. I was so full of meat and wine I forgot to take photos, but this happened about an hour before and still serves to trigger my memory.

1. Temporally the events are rather far apart (about 15 years), but causality-wise they intricately entwined. ↩

What is the Startupbus? A 3 day hackathon on wheels throttling towards SXSW at 75mph. Buses full of developers, designers, and hustlers leave from 12 cities with the goal of creating and pitching a startup upon arrival in Austin. Complete strangers thrown together to combat tight deadlines, motion-sickness, patchy wifi, and other obstacles all intent on making something great. Is it crazy? Totally. Is it awesome? Undoubtedly so.

A week ago I returned from an insanely amazing and sleep-deprived week of making (both products and friends). Together with the most kick-ass team of creative trouble-makers^[1] I could have ever wished for we created Happstr, an app that tracks and analyzes happiness.

I'm still working on a longer post about all the shenanigans and learnings from the trip, but I wanted to take a moment to encourage everyone to consider applying for the bus next year. If you want to challenge yourself, meet amazing people, form new friendships, and shift your perspective, the bus is definitely for you. Want to know more? Come to the Startupbus Demo night on April 5th (details forthcoming), where you can learn more about the Startupbus, listen to pitches, and talk to some of the folks who were on the bus this year.

I'd also like to send out special love to Eastmedia for sponsoring my trip, and Simplereach for making sure I came home safe and sound.

Oh! And be sure to check out Louisiana's bus application^[2], which has set a new bar for 2013:

1. Jennifer Gergen, Johan Uhle, Nate Cooper, Ricky Robinett, and Robert Hanley ↩
2. Each year cities apply for a bus, usually by massive Twitter love and retweets. Louisiana threw down the gauntlet with their music video submission. ↩

New York has about 244 neighborhoods, depending on who you ask. Some large, others small, and many nested within each other like Russian dolls. The differences between them can be bold or subtle, obvious or hidden, and not always available to the immediate senses. Bringing these differences to light, providing insight and context to location, is something NabeWise is just a little obsessed with. A few weeks ago we released Version 2 of our mobile site, combining geolocation with quantitative and qualitative data to provide profiles for neighborhoods as they are traversed. Because the new mobile experience is vastly different from its predecessor, I thought it might be interesting to capture the reasoning and process that lead to the version we have today.

The Problem:

The first mobile site^[1] we built was feature rich and duplicated a considerable amount of the desktop experience. We even included city maps and neighborhood overlays with the option to track your location in real-time, which was totally awesome when taking the train up to Boston and zipping through all the neighborhoods in Queens, but fairly cumbersome otherwise. In product meetings we'd discuss technical approaches to speeding up the application until one day we finally realized we didn't want a faster version of the current app, but a different app entirely - an app whose sole purpose was to answer the basic question, "Where am I?"

There are a number of different ways people navigate cities, two of the most common being destination directed (going from point a to point b) and discovery directed (wandering by whim and serendipity). When trying to reach a specific destination people generally care more about the how (how do I get there?) and the specific where, while people who are taking a more exploratory and less directed approach care more about the what and the general where (where am I and what is its story?). Google Maps does a stellar job pinpointing the specific coordinates at which you happen to be standing and what streets, stores, and intersections are nearby, but it doesn't help very much with the slightly less specific context and general where embodied by a neighborhood.

And that's what we wanted our mobile app to do – provide an answer to the question of general where, and in the process maybe even settle a few bar bets^[2].

Then what?

With a freshly defined purpose we set out to discuss details which, naturally, requires beer. We hashed through possibilities and potentials, argued about functionality and features, and threw around ideas until we settled on a core set of content^[3]. We dropped the city map and location tracking, search, and even navigation in the process. It was a gruesome battle, but in the end we were rather satisfied with our work.

Sketching on a stack of paper wireframes we explored a variety of interface ideas. The narrowed, focused set of content we had selected led us in new directions and demanded to be handled appropriately. At every step of the way the temptation to add “just one more thing” was strong, but we disciplined ourselves, asked why at every turn, and ultimately prevailed in keeping the app focused on that one question, “Where am I?” So focused in fact, that the site boasts only one button which reads, “Where am I?”

Visually the mobile site inherits from the web app, though the background is new and is actually a map of SoHo from the early 20th century. Bendy (our friendly NabeWise llama) makes an appearance on the error screen, which generally pops up if you are in a city we don’t currently cover. Neighborhood information is displayed in a vertical list eliminating the need for extra taps. While we removed any form of global, structured navigation, there are a few different ways you can navigate:

• Through neighborhood containment, which is what we call our system for determining relationships between neighborhoods. If you happen to be in a neighborhood that contains or is contained by another neighborhood, we’ll show you the surrounding context and ways to view those neighborhoods.
• Physically navigate to another neighborhood

It’s the second method of navigation I love about version two; you must physically move yourself in the world to navigate through the site. The idea of transportation paths and patterns as interface is intriguing, and while our site only scratches the surface, it’s a topic I’ll continue to explore.

And so?

And so we’ve launched! If you’re in any of the cities we currently cover, definitely check it out. It’s not the kind of app that will bug you 20 times a day or make you feel overwhelmed with information; rather it’s the kind of app that’s there when you need it, with enough information to help but not hinder, and let you go about your day when you are done.

1. Going with a web approach allowed us to explore mobile ideas available to all platforms. While native apps are in the product roadmap, we knew we wanted to build out the web side first. ↩
2. In New York it’s not uncommon to overhear people arguing about what neighborhood they are in, especially at bars ↩
3. Core content: description, photograph, reputation, top attributes, real estate values, reviews. ↩

The Project for Public Spaces defines placemaking as a formal process of improving public spaces, but I'm wondering if there isn't personal or vernacular form of placemaking that occurs as an emergent property of individual and community behaviors. My brother, with a masters in Urban Planning, says that placemaking only pertains to the process at the formal level and ceases to have meaning in informal settings. So what do we call this form of intrinsic placemaking - what is the name for the behaviors that help us understand and connect to a place?

I've been thinking about this recently because of two articles from the December 5, 2011 issue of the New Yorker. While the subject matter is dramatically different, both consider place through personal and communal lenses. You'll need a subscription to access the articles in their entirety, but the quotes convey the basic gist. I'm going to pour another beer and engage my brother in a deeper discussion. Hopefully we'll come up with something...

The Tao of WiFi by Lauren Collins

Like architecture and restaurants, wireless names suggest the character of a neighborhood.

A literary approach to wardriving, Alexandra Janelli sleuths wifi networks to uncover the very particular and personal characteristic of neighborhoods.

Mapping Home by Aleksandar Hemon

I gradually became aware that my interiority was inseparable from my exteriority, that the geography of my city was the geography of my soul. Physically and metaphysically, I was placed.

Because anonymity was well nigh impossible and privacy literally incomprehensible (there is no word for “privacy” in Bosnian), your fellow-Sarajevans knew you as well as you knew them. If you somehow vanished, your fellow-citizens could have reconstructed you from their collective memory and the gossip that had accrued over years. Your sense of who you were, your deepest identity, was determined by your position in a human network, whose physical corollary was the architecture of the city.

In which the author tracks his personal history from old Sarajevo, to Chicago, to new Sarajevo and begins to understand place through the process of learning a new city and remembering the old.

In each of these cases, I would argue that the street, the urban street, as public space is to be differentiated from the classic European notion of more ritualized spaces for public activity, with the piazza and the boulevard the emblematic European instances. I think of the space of “the street,” which of course includes squares and any available open space, as a rawer and less ritualized space. The Street is a space where new forms of the social and the political can be made, rather than a space for enacting ritualized routines. With some conceptual stretching, we might say that politically “street and square” are marked differently from “boulevard and piazza”: the first signals action, and the second, ritual.

Resolve to do lots of writing along the way. Much of it will be routine note-taking, but you should also write reflectively, to understand: make outlines; explain why you disagree with a source; draw diagrams to connect disparate facts; summarize sources, positions, and schools; record even random thoughts. Many researchers find it useful to keep a journal for hunches, new ideas, random thoughts, problems, and so on. You might not include much of this writing-to-discover-and-understand in your final draft. But when you write as you go, every day you encourage your own best critical thinking, understand your sources better, and, when the time comes, draft more productively.

In his talk, "New Soft City" during Interaction '10, Dan Hill emphatically illustrates an approach to urban informatics that utilizes the fabric of the city as a medium for visualization ((While not discussed in much depth, he does mention two trends that inform this position: 1) The ease in which screens can be co-opted for the purpose of advertising and 2) the efficacy of urban screens is dramatically decreasing as people learn to block them out)).

Hill presents a diverse range of projects he's been involved with over the years, the majority of which attempt to expose consumption metrics externally and make the invisible visible. All of the projects are incredibly inspiring (checkout the responsive architecture project for the design of the Masdar City Center), but I'm particularly struck by the collaboration with the State Library of Queensland for Sense and Sustainability, a platform for public art. For this project, the building housing The Edge was layered in a sensor network in order to capture data generated by the building, which was then turned into an API. Dan has already written about the street as a platform, and I think the building as API is a nice corollary.

In combination with initiatives like the EEML, a protocol for sharing real time sensor data, and the open source approach of the Urban Versioning System, a framework is starting to emerge that will give people the vocabulary and material to experiment with more complex feedback loops. We'll have access to data generated not only by our social and financial activities, but by our environment as well. While I'm not sure what this means for urban growth and development or where it lies in dialogue around "smart cities", I do think the four questions Dan closes with are something to consider:

• How do people expect systems to behave?
• How does information work as material?
• How should we extend the capabilities of people, buildings, and infrastructure?
• What new cities does this enable?

Urbanized: coming to theaters near you

Urban Design Week NYC

Rethink NYC

Panel-oke combines panels and karaoke to create a more participatory and fluid approach to panels by inviting the audience to not only become the questioner, but to become the panel as well. The basic idea is that panels are re-formed in response to each question that is asked. While in play, the panel is a fluid entity and can become larger or smaller as answers are explored. In this format, the distinction between audience and participants fades away and the panel process becomes a fully collaborative event.

Traditional panel interactions happen between questioners and panels, while the audience takes on the passive role of consumer/observer. Audience members actively participate when they assume the role of questioner, but their participation is strictly limited once the initial proposition has been stated. In this format only a very small percentage of the passive audience becomes active questioners, while attempts to ‘become the panel’ don’t even manifest as a possibility throughout the duration of the panel presentation.

On the opposite side of the spectrum is karaoke, participatory and open at the core, its form and structure shift from moment to moment. At times a practiced veteran might skillfully control the audience and demand utmost attention and devotion. Other times a classic tune might incite the entire room to belt along with sloppy grins on their faces, swaying and singing together.

Panel + Karaoke = Panel-oke!

John and Peter, both New York IxDA Leaders, take part in the panel on visual and interaction design.

Why Paneloke?

Panel-oke was hatched at Interaction ’11, the annual Interaction Design Association conference. Several tracks of the conference consisted of five 20 minute long ‘lightning’ presentations, followed by a panel session with all of the people who had just presented. With an audience of 650 people, the panel was able to field four or five questions before the moderator wrapped-up with a quick summary and sent us all off to lunch (or drinks). The panelists were great, the questions were great, but when you have such a high concentration of experts in one room – such a large and diverse pool of experience and knowledge to pull from – why not tap into that as well?

Over lunch Ian (@iswinson) and I were discussing the panels when he brilliantly mashed up panels and karaoke and exclaimed, “Panel-oke!”. We pushed our mediocre noodles aside and explored the idea more. It made sense, it was plausible, and it fit with the ethos of interaction designers. Over the next couple days we bounced the idea off of people and the reception was positive. Panel-oke was viable.

Testing it out

It just so happened that Ian was going to be in New York in early March, so the New York branch of the IxDA sprung into action to put on the inaugural Panel-oke event. Originally we thought we’d just have a small group of guinea pigs, but with an overwhelming 72 RSVPs we realized we had a larger event on our hands. Experimental events need a few things to work successfully: alcohol, willing participants, and in the case of Panel-oke, enough room to move about and re-form panels at will.

To help execute the event, Pivotal Labs offered their new space and InfinityPlusOne (aka @yoni) plied the group with wine and beer to loosen tongues and boost courage. Mix in the enthusiastic participation of the New York Design community and it’s hard to go wrong. Unexpected enhancements came by way of the PA system with two mics, and a mini-gong mysteriously housed above the fridge.

Ian and I kicking off the inaugeral Panel-oke event.

Ian has a great write-up of the event (check out the full post) and sums up the logistics of Panel-oke as,

“a pretty easy event to organize and set up. The room was generously sized but not overwhelming at about 30 by 75 feet. Against one long wall we place a whiteboard and four chairs. The whiteboard displayed the rules, the hashtag for live tweeting (#paneloke), and the @IxDA_NYC twitter handle. Facing the four chairs we had fifty seats arranged in three rows and forming a slight arch to center the audience on the panel. In the fridge there was beer and wine (thanks again Yoni!) and near the fridge we had name tags, slips of paper and pens. Since this was primarily intended to be a social networking event the name tags are a given. The paper and pens were for preparing questions in advance of the actual discussions. We allowed folks to either hold onto their questions or drop them in a bag for possible inclusion in a discussion round as a wildcard and anonymous submission.”

The biggest unknown was how long a panel should last, how actively we should moderate, and how to keep the flow going. We started out with a 5 minute limit, but it quickly became apparent that a good conversation between 3 – 5 people takes about 10 – 15 minutes to get to a satisfactory concluding point (and perhaps even longer if the audience has had a shared experience). When time was up someone would bang the gong and we’d check-in with the audience to see if they wanted a new song or to continue with the current one. Using the room as a sounding-board, we navigated our way through 4 panel topics in a little under an hour.

Participants look on from the vortex of the insanely-comfy lounge chairs.

Questions asked (roughly summarized):

1. What is Agile UX?
2. How do you integrate accessibility into *all* stages of the product design/dev process?
3. Success and horror stories trying to convince the client your solution is right.
4. IxD and Visual Design – should we all be visual designers? Where is visual design in the process and how do we communicate with visual designers?

Retrospective Feedback

Feedback was overall positive, and unified in the desire to encourage even more participation. Suggestions included:

• More audience participation – using props for people to signal additional participation / a change in topic
• Too much light makes the baby go blind – an improve technique I’m not too familiar with, but the gist is that there is a string of theme labels hanging near the panel and participants can change the topic by coming up and grabbing one off the line
• Better seating arrangement – our configuration didn’t do much to disrupt the traditional seating structure for panels.
• Documentation and moderation – Putting follow-up questions in a parking-lot on the whiteboard, summarizing the points covered, and actively moderating the panel makes everyone happy.
• Bring in the WWF – More tag-team style participation to increase audience involvement and magnify spontaneity
• Bigger gong – Designers are unhappy with small, tin-sounding gongs. Make sure the gong really means it.

Have gong, will travel.

Major thanks

Huge thanks to Pivotal Labs for the great space, @yoni for the generous libations which kept the whole shebang going, the IxDA NYC local group for making the entire thing happen, Eastmedia for making sure it happened in the first place, Samuel Lee for photographic documentation, and the New York Design community for their engaged and supportive collaboration.

Resources

• Panel-oke rulesheet (pdf)
• Panel-oke! – via Ian Swinson
• IxDA Panel-Oke – via Samuel Lee